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The Genius of Ramanujan and Paul Erdős

Mathematicians are strange creatures. Here's a story about Paul Erdős.

In addition, as many of Erdős's collaborations were handled via mail, and because he
dealt with so many people he would sometimes forget what they actually looked like. On
one occasion, Erdős met a mathematician and asked him where he was from.
"Vancouver," the mathematician replied. "Oh, then you must know my good friend Elliot
Mendelson", Erdős said. The reply was "I AM your good friend Elliot Mendelson."

Paul Erdős's first paper was a new proof of Bertrand's conjecture which states that there is always a prime number between any number and twice that number.

Erdős is the most prolific mathematician in history with author credits for 1521 academic papers. He was a prolific collaborator as well and collaborated with 509 authors.

Of course, Hardy 'discovered' Ramanujan and considered it the one 'great romance' of his life.

Among his many contributions to number theory, Ramanujan's various formulas related to the value of pi are quite remarkable. These formulas continue to be used today as the value of pi continues to be calculated to trillions of decimal places.

Whereas you or I might be happy to know the value of pi to, say, four decimal places, mathematicians like to go berserk and since the advent of computers from round about the middle of the 20th century, there has been an esoteric race going on in this sphere.

In the 21st century, with the aid of capable supercomputers, the value of pi has been determined to more than 10 trillion decimal places.

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My favorite words at present: There are no lessons to be learnt, no
discoveries to be made, no solutions to offer. I find myself left with
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can look back and see that although a human life is less than the blink
of an eyelid in terms of the universe, within its own framework it is
amazingly capacious so that it can contain many opposites. One life can
contain serenity and tumult, heartbreak and happiness, coldness and
warmth, grabbing and giving — and also more particular opposites such as
a neurotic conviction that one is a flop and a consciousness of success
amounting to smugness.

I think I am a born rebel or a subversive. I am definitely an atheist. I sometimes feel that in a country as suffocatingly religious as India, some of us have to go to the other extreme as a counterweight to all the religious blindness which is there.